


satisfaction killed the cat

by catpoop



Category: Bad Samaritan (2018), Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - School, Animal Death, Blood and Violence, Gen, Kid Fic, Mild Gore, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-09 00:42:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20844734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catpoop/pseuds/catpoop
Summary: Kevin Thompson (10), meets Cale Erendreich (6). Unfortunately for their school and everyone else in their vicinity, they do not a killer combo make.A killer combo ofanothersort, however...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this came to me in a vision...
> 
> nah i just had a really vivid image of tiny child!cale hunched over behind the sports shed hacking things open
> 
> EDIT: overh0l on twit/tumblr drew [art](https://swummeng-geys.tumblr.com/post/188104500837/aaaaahhh-overh0l-drew-art-for-my-cale-kilgrave) for my fic im gonna YELL (i hv also inserted it in the body of the fic)

Kevin Thompson, aged ten, is stomping around the schoolyard when he decides on a whim to wander behind the shed in the corner. He doesn’t know what he’s aiming to find until he gets there (_someone to bother? Some kid to sway to his beck and call?_) – and the muffled sounds of something sharp and wet has Kevin eagerly popping his head around the corner.

A kid he doesn’t recognise. Small, lean-limbed, hunched over the ground with messy thatch of brown hair sticking from his head. Combined with the beiges and blues of their uniform, he makes an unremarkable sight. That is, before Kevin spots the great silver steak knife clenched in one firm fist, point aimed downwards.

He follows its serrated edge down to the mangled corpse of a bird, and the scene is just so very inexplicable that Kevin asks: “What’re you doing there? Tell me.”

The boy looks up at him for a split second, eyes dark as pitch, before turning back to the task at hand. The knife’s edge hacks at a wing until it pops off in a stretched-out sheaf of feathers.

“Oi!” Kevin demands, “What are you doing? Tell me what you’re doing.”

A mumble slips imperceptible from the boy’s lips as he uncoordinatedly swings the knife now, to land crack-crack-_crack_ against what must be the bird’s ribcage. Kevin’s had many a roast chicken dinner in his time, and he assumes this is similar in nature.

He squats down, frustrated at persistent lack of answer. “What? I can’t hear you.”

Finally, the boy stills in his actions and whips his head around, annoyed. This is something Kevin is quite familiar with – he has the unfaltering ability to annoy anyone he pleases, and to force an answer to his every question.

“‘M cutting a _bird_!” The boy shouts, voice high and nasally and protesting in tone. “What do you want!”

“Nothing. I just want to watch.” Kevin shifts to settle comfortably on his rear, smiling when the boy shoots him a distinctly scathing look.

They sit in silence for a moment then, Kevin suitably entertained as the body, like magic, reduces to limbs, scraps of skin, and ribcage rent in half with viscera hungrily spilling out. His nose wrinkles when the boy eagerly reaches to tug an unending string of _gut_ from within. 

Gross.

“What are you gonna do with that?” He asks eventually, when the boy has turned his focus to splitting each bloody rib to stack in a neat pile.

“Nothing.” The answer he gets is directed at the deconstructed fowl. “I – it looks nice.” The small smile that then upturns his lips is the only expression that has flickered across his stony face in the past half-hour.

Objectively, Kevin can see nothing nice or nice-adjacent about the pile of guts and bones building up on the grass, and he says as much. 

“Weirdo.” Standing up and brushing the grass off his pants, he walks back to the main playground.

Kevin only stumbles across the kid again after a few days. He had been keeping the encounter in mind and come to the conclusion that the boy, thin-limbed and diminutive as he was, was from some year-group below his. 

Though ‘stumbles’ is not exactly the right word. Kevin seeks him out of his own accord, finding the boy once more behind the shed. 

This time, there is no bird in sight.

“Where’s your bird?”

“Din’t catch one.”

“Oh. Boring.”

The boy tilts his head up to properly stare at Kevin, eyes boring holes into him. Undeterred, Kevin fishes for another question.

“What’s your name? How old are you?”

“Cale… ‘m six.”

“Oh, yuck.” Kevin makes a rule of avoiding the babies in his school, lest they cry or poop or yell in his vicinity.

He gives the boy, _Cale_, another once-over, glancing at his knobbly knees and still-messy hair and darkly-stained blue polo. Nothing special, and Kevin finds his mind drifting away to more interesting things – the possible scenes of chaos he could spread in the playground, for one – as he starts to walk away.

No bird, and no point in staying.

They don’t always _work_, the commands Kevin throws around, but sometimes they do, and that’s what matters to him. When he can make his mother iron her hand, or one of the kids pummel another, or the school bus driver swerve off to one side on account of a little ratbag clawing at his face while they’re going a solid 40.

He comes back to Cale with this proposal, when drawn-out entrails have come swimming across his mind in one too many a dull class. Frustratingly, it’s by far the most interesting thing he’s seen in a while.

“I can tell someone to catch a bird for you.” He watches Cale glance longingly at the fat ducks waddling in the distance, handle of his knife visible above his waistband.

“‘S hard though.”

As Kevin considers this, the kid seems to offer a demonstration and creeps closer, arms cautiously outstretched. Not a second later, the duck makes a determined waddle in the opposite direction. Cale soon gives up the pretence of stealth entirely, scream bursting from his mouth as he chases after the duck at a solid sprint, short legs carrying him across the field and back, to roll panting at Kevin’s feet.

“…Hard,” he declares conclusively.

“D’you think I could _tell_ a duck to sit still and get stabbed?” Kevin wonders aloud to himself.

“What?” Cale’s voice is the most alert he’s ever heard it. 

Kevin repeats himself, slower. “_D’you th–_”

“Can you catch a bird?” Cale interrupts. He looks deadly serious.

“Oh, well…”

Confidence carries Kevin as far as standing several metres from a duck and commanding it to ‘stay still’. It waddles away from him. When he turns around to check, Cale is still watching him with rapt, eagle-eyed focus. _Fine._ He’ll – give it a try.

What Kevin Thompson, aged ten, did not foresee is that all the inflated delusions of grandiosity and power in the world cannot erase one’s true instinct. That is, the instinct of a ten-year old boy to run circles chasing waterfowl. This particular pursuit was for quite a different reason to other bird-chasing boys his age, but the act itself is one and the same. 

The conclusion surprises even Kevin himself, when he rolls to a halt with both fists around the neck of a visibly-offended duck. As quickly as he can (the duck is getting angry, and violent), he stumbles back to the hidden corner of the shed. 

Cale bounces on the balls of his feet at the sight.

“Yes!”

The boy falters only briefly despite the sudden weight of an entire bird deposited in his arms. The knife that flashes as it emerges from Cale’s waistband is even more impressive and Kevin can only watch in amusement as it efficiently silences the bird’s squawking and pecking.

“You owe me one now.”

The mumble is barely audible over the hacking of steel at bone. “…What?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> more chilrrens...
> 
> Please look at hol's art for the first chapter if u havent already i am! in awe!!

Cale Erendreich takes the presence of the new boy in stride, even though no one else had ever found out about this hobby of his. It hadn’t seemed right, not after the way his mother had shrieked in disgust at the first ratty carcass in the front yard, cursing every neighbourhood cat to hell.

He hadn’t intended to make a scene, but the call for lunch had sent him scrambling to his feet, toys abandoned to the wayside. If said toy was on this one occasion a downed and recently-strangled bird, Cale had made no indication at the dining table.

In between bites of sandwich bread (filling having been already strategically eaten), he thinks about small creatures and cracked bones and soft fleshy bodies giving way. Bread tears to crumbs in his fingertips. 

This distraction sees Cale pushing breadcrumbs across the tabletop for at least an hour – the scream brings him back to awareness.

The tapestry of guts and feathers and gore has been already angrily deposited in the nearest bin when Cale remembers its existence. 

“B-Bird…”

His mother can’t hear him over her own shouting.

From then, he tries to be smarter about it, keeping the knife he had nicked from an overhead drawer safely hidden. The bloodstains he passes off as dirt – not that anyone had bothered to ask.

“Get out of the way!” His dad says, and Cale walks out the back door and down the street and all the way to the nearest park. He just wants to… try something.

“Try… thing,” he mumbles to himself, walking circles around the base of a tree. That was where he had previously found the injured bird, though in his own backyard, and Cale itches for a repeat.

“Birdy – hello, birdy?”

There’s no reply, so he plucks a stick from the ground and digs around in the foliage at his feet, kicking leaves and acorns and finding naught but dirt. A nearby bird hops away at the sound. Cale pouts.

His bottom lip juts further when he returns home after dark and gets a thorough yelling-at. Of course, a little yelling never stopped Cale.

The time after that, he finds roadkill on the way to the park. It’s not quite the same, when the light has already faded from the critter’s eyes. So Cale tries again.

By the time Kevin Thompson finds him on school grounds, Cale has spent a year perfecting his technique to impressive levels – if he may say so himself. 

_‘I can cut birds really good,’_ he says to himself. The disembodied head and neck in his hands nods an agreement.

He says much the same thing when the teacher goes around the class and asks them what they all want to do when they grow up.

“Do you want to raise birds?” Mr Markie asks, friendly, though the expression on his face is one Cale has learnt means something unpleasant and concerning. When the adults don’t really like what he says, and would prefer he shut up.

“Nnmm…” He thinks. “Yes.”

They quickly move onto the next kid, Cale left mentally scratching his head and wondering if he can make ‘cutting birds’ a job. It’s fun, he concludes. And he likes to do fun things.

It’s a degree of fun, Cale soon realises, that surpasses any other toy he’s had before, or any game they play in school. More fun than holding his breath when his mum or dad comes to check on him at night, pretending he’s still and cold and dead. For some reason, his acting is never convincing enough.

This, unfortunately, drags the school day out into a dreary facsimile of work, where Cale spends every minute watching the sparrows play outside instead of learning. When asked to participate, he has to violently jerk his mind away from the scene-by-scene replay of some poor critter’s death. He freezes in momentary confusion. Someone laughs. 

“He said _stand up_!” A classmate explains.

Cale stands up, and drifts back into daydreaming.

As such, morning tea and lunch breaks become the favourite part of his day. This is much the same for the gaggle of his classmates as they rush over each other out the door, but Cale quickly finds himself in more isolated sections of the playground, where field merges into bushes merges into people’s backyards.

The school buildings are a long walk away and the _adults_ even farther, and Cale settles, happy.

He digs his knife into the ground. He aims it at a sparrow – it scatters. He tries and fails to catch anything in an entire week’s worth of lunch breaks and throws a screaming tantrum.

He returns home and tucks his knife carefully beneath his pillow and stacks legos only to angrily pry them apart again.

Eventually, Cale throws himself at a nearby pigeon, fast enough to catch it unawares and strike it, steel-spike, through the breast. He soothes into peaceable content.

When Kevin comes to bother him, Cale is a little less content. He scrunches his brow, stiffens his shoulder, tightens grip on bird carcass – in that way he knows should ward off the older boy.

Kevin ignores this and responds with belligerent enthusiasm.

(Cale learns his name when Kevin talks to himself about himself, loudly and exuberantly and in such a way that makes Cale want to clamp hands over ears – if his hands weren’t currently occupied. He files the older boy’s name away into that corner of his brain he reserves for things he doesn’t care about.)

“Doesn’t that get boring?” Kevin says one day – on precisely the fourth occasion he sits and squats and loudly watches Cale go about his favourite pastime. Cale frowns reflexively, then deepens the frown even further.

“No.”

“Well I think it does.” Kevin continues to speak. “How many _birds_ can you cut up? They all look the same inside, and they’re gross and slimy and feathery.”

“A lot of birds.” And they don’t all look the same, Cale adds mentally. He sees brown feathers and blue feathers and grey feathers clumped up in his hands. Tawny eyes and red eyes and black beady eyes turning glassy in his grip. His current victim stares up through unseeing brown.

Kevin grunts. “Why don’t you try something bigger? That’d be fun.”

“This is fun.” Cale says, and gets shushed.

“_What’d_ be fun is… a cat. Or a dog. One of those big dogs, the size of people. What do you think is inside one of those?”

The question strikes Cale dumb. He has no clue, and try as he might to refuse Kevin’s meddling tendencies, the proposal is a curious one.

“I… can’t catch a cat.” The neighbourhood cat always runs away when Cale tries to pet it. He wonders at going in with a knife.

“Well of course you can’t, you’re six!” Kevin spits. “I probably could, though. What do you think?”

A moment of silence passes before Cale looks up from his splintered pile of bones, to find Kevin expectantly staring at him. The older boy lets out a dramatic sigh at his lack of response.

“Whatever. I say let’s go do it.”

Cale stays silent, and the remainder of the lunch break once more returns to one-sided conversation.

Despite his reticence, Cale’s brain is whirling now, having dug its teeth into the idea a little more. He’d never considered something _outside_ of birds, not when his first experience had been dismembering a little feathered thing. 

_Cats don’t have feathers,_ Cale’s mind weakly protests. _They don’t have two legs, or red flesh, or spooling coils of viscera._

Not that he knows that for sure. He considers it for a moment, before turning to the older boy. “Do cats have – feathers?” 

The question comes out wrong, evident as Kevin stares at him, guffaw loud and obnoxious. “’Course they don’t, dumbass! What, d’you only like killing things with feathers on ‘em? We should glue feathers to Mrs Harvey.”

Kevin’s teacher, if Cale’s absent-minded listening has taught him anything. But why he loathes her, Cale has not a clue. He’s too busy ignoring the rush in his ears at Kevin’s outburst to focus on the matter.

Kevin prods him, sharp-tongued. “So? Would you kill a cat? Answer me.”

“D…Dunno.”

“Lame.”

Cale draws his shoulders up to his ears and stares fixedly at his hands. He thumbs a smear of brown across his palm.

The annoying timbre of Kevin’s voice follows his thoughts well into the evening, until Cale can barely sit still at the dinner table, worried as he is about what to do when the next bird presents itself. What if Kevin is right – but he doesn’t like to admit – what if he _should_ – should he try something different – ?

“Stay still,” his dad says, and Cale stiffens.

The upset in his stomach has nothing to do with the food he’s eating, and all to do with the unpleasant unknown that lurks in the near future.

As it turns out, Kevin makes the decision for him. Cale doesn’t know how to feel about that.

“Don’t _growl_ at me,” Kevin says, incredulous. “Anyway. Here’s a tin of tuna.” He opens it with a creak. “And now we just leave it until lunch, and grab the cat that shows up. Simple.”

Cale grinds his teeth. “…Fine.” He can smell the fish from here, and he hopes the neighbourhood cats will too. 

Kevin beams, though the smile is more blistering than sun-radiant. “And you’re the freak with the knife, so you stab it.”

“Okay…”

They return two hours later to a half-eaten tin, and no cat. Kevin scowls and waves his arms and makes broad accusations as Cale stands there in silence. 

“-damn _cats_, wasting my tuna –”

“What if we wait?” Cale interrupts. He sits down, folding his legs beneath himself and settling to stare at the tin a few metres away. The bushes nearby rustle with the breeze.

“That’s _bo_ring, though,” Kevin protests.

Cale doesn’t deign to reply with anything other than his most, adult-_est_, “Shut up!”

Kevin huffs and throws his arms around some more, but he begrudgingly sits down to pluck at the grass, twisting and turning to look at their surroundings as the minutes go by. 

Cale stays stock-still.

This pays off eventually, when a skinny black cat comes slinking out of the bushes, to sniff at the tin and the ground and stare unblinking at Cale. Cale stares back.

Kevin, entirely unaware, is starfished on the ground beside him and staring up at the clouds. He sits upright with a questioning noise when Cale shifts onto hands and knees to crawl closer.

“What? Did we get something?” He asks, voice loud and grating and thrice as annoying now that Cale is trying to _concentrate_ and get the job done. It’s a miracle the cat doesn’t scatter.

“Shh!” Cale hisses.

“Oh, perfect!” Kevin crows upon seeing their target, and still at the same volume.

Cale creeps closer, slipping the knife from his waistband to his right fist. The cat has completely given up the pretence of eating now, hunkered close to the ground and tracking Cale’s every move. 

“Don’t run, kitty,” he mumbles. 

The cat runs.

Reflex has Cale snapping his wrist to send the knife flying. The yowl that immediately follows his knife disappearing into bush tells him he’s hit _something_, and he leaps up onto two feet.

“I hit it!” He cries. “I hit it!”

“Is it dead?” Kevin has moved to stand beside him, though Cale quickly darts forwards and after his knife. He pushes leaves and branches aside to find, to his disappointment, his knife lying alone on the ground, the slightest tip of the blade dipped in red and not a single cat to be seen.

His lip is wobbling when he re-emerges, Kevin looking expectantly down at him.

“So?”

“It’s gone…”

Kevin’s eyes boggle. “What, that’s it? Are you telling me I wasted my whole lunch break just to see some cat eat my tuna and leave?”

Cale nods stiffly.

“Wow. Wow, that was dumb. What was the point, then? Stupid cat…” Scowling, the older boy walks away, already a third of the way across the field when Cale recovers.

“Wait –” he mumbles, but Kevin is already too far away to hear. The grip on his knife loosens in defeat. He’d _nearly_ gotten it, had let it slip away by the merest millimetres. 

Frustration dogs Cale all through his afternoon classes, until Mr Markie has to pull him aside and ask him if everything is okay.

“’M okay.” Cale nods, looking at a spot to the left of his teacher’s shoulder.

“If you say so, Cale…”

Of course, everything is far from being okay. Instead of walking home after school, Cale makes the decision to return immediately to the tin of fish they’d laid. He _has_ to finish this – there’s no other option.

This is how Kevin finds him an hour later, the older boy having decided to stroll past on a whim. Cale looks up, elbow-deep in cat gut and grinning from head to toe. The smile doesn’t fade even as Kevin opens his mouth.

He sounds surprised. “Oh! You did it.”

“Yeah.”

“Wasn’t that fun?” Kevin doesn’t wait for an answer before continuing. “See, that’s why you should listen to my ideas.”

It was fun – _is_ fun, Cale admits. A satisfaction resonates from deep within his core, and he doesn’t have to vocabulary to put it into words. 

Kevin watches all this, and thinks loudly. 

“Do you want to try a dog next?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the boys... they Be Doin Bad Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pls heed the tags n warnings
> 
> also forgive me this is so Not-EDited but i just wanted to get the content out

They try the dog – try being the operative term, Kevin stopped at the front door when he attempts to lead Lulu to school.

_Oh well._ There are bigger, more exciting things to aim for, and he isn’t letting one measly dog get in the way. Cale looks unperturbed at the ‘bad’ news when Kevin finds him at morning tea, the younger boy contenting himself with stabbing knife-shaped wounds into the ground.

“Forget the dog. Do you think you could use that knife of yours on something bigger?”

Cale doesn’t look at him.

“Oi, look at me!” The command doesn’t work, so Kevin continues to speak. “Something bigger… like a _person_…? Hey!”

That garners a response. “Don’t like people,” Cale mumbles. 

“Which is why you should try stab someone, right? And hey, I’m people too? Don’t you like me?” Kevin gestures grandly at himself.

“No.” The small voice states in no uncertain terms.

Kevin resists the urge to throttle the little ingrate. “Rude. I caught a duck for you. If it weren’t for me, you’d never have cut that cat up.”

The cat is still nearby, though thankfully neatly buried in the dozenth of a line of small graves. The smell would be unbearable otherwise.

“If it weren’t for _me_,” he continues, “you’d still be dumb and boring and out here by yourself.” An idea springs into Kevin’s mind as he looks down at the kid, still sitting mute and distracted. “Hey, I know what we should do, since you’re just being boring. Why don’t we go mess with them on the playground – I _said,_ let’s go mess with them on the playground. Follow me.”

He grins as the command works its magic, Cale unfolding to stand upright and stare balefully up at him.

“Follow me,” he repeats. Kevin’s feeling lucky, like it might be a good day.

For him, _good_ days are few and far in between, despite the cheerful countenance he is adept at maintaining. If he were four years younger and four years shorter, Kevin thinks, he’d be scowling like Cale and throwing tantrums all day long.

The utter frustration that overwhelms him whenever a command falls flat is hard to describe, but it burns searing up his belly and aches in his jaw and limns the world in red. Is it too much to ask, Kevin fumes, to just get what he wants?

If people ironed their hands every time he asked, or stabbed pencils up their noses, or stapled worksheets to their flesh, the world would be a happier place. Kevin just doesn’t understand why he’s been granted this taste of paradise, but never in its entirety.

As such, he holds onto this working command with relish, hearing Cale shuffle along behind him as they approach the playground and courts.

A few of the boys look over when they see him approaching, disdain clear in their voices.

“Oh, it’s Kevin.”

Kevin ignores this. “Hi,” he waves. “Don’t you just want to start punching each other?”

An incredulous silence. “_What?_”

“I said,” he clears his throat. “Start punching each other. Start fighting! It’ll be fun.”

He catches the arched confusion of an eyebrow before the nearest boy turns away, arms flying up to meet his companion. Another set of fists catch him in the side of the head.

Kevin grins, turning to look at Cale. “See?”

The wide-eyed stare he gets in response isn’t actually an answer, but Kevin takes it for amazement and awe. He nods smugly and takes a step back, to merge with the growing crowd forming around them.

He counts at least three bleeding noses. One teacher steps in to break up the fight, and then a second, and a third.

One boy is swinging his dislocated arm around when the crowd is finally forced to scatter, and Kevin leads Cale away, feeling quite proud.

“See?” He says once more, where they’re sequestered somewhere more private. The same private somewhere as always, of course. “I can get people to do whatever I want. Isn’t that cool?”

Cale nods dumbly.

“That’s why you should listen to me – well, you have no choice, anyway. So what do you say? We try trap someone here, and then you can use your knife!”

“I don’t like people,” Cale shakes his head. “Too loud.”

Kevin scoffs. “Then I’ll tell them to shut up. Whatever.”

This marks the beginning of a plan. Kevin fancies it a collaborative effort, him and his small-mute-animal-like companion, but he’s definitely the one doing all the _planning_.

Cale contributes naught but, as Kevin soon discovers, unnecessary complexity. 

He presents the boy – a classmate, aged ten, bespectacled and presumably-unnamed (Kevin had never caught it, thus he assumes) – to his small jury of one.

“Look, Cale,” he says as if speaking to a little dog, “What do you think?”

The bespectacled boy clears his throat just as Cale looks ready to formulate an answer, interrupting: “Um. What are you guys doing?”

Kevin shushes him, but it’s too late. Cale stares at the boy, then stares at Kevin, lip wobbling until it looks ready to wobble right off.

“NO!” He shrieks, and they both jump. “_NO_ no no no no! I don’t like it I don’t _like it_!”

Kevin makes a face, one that Cale returns with features horrifically crumpled, cheeks red and splotchy.

The younger boy topples to the ground from the sheer force of his screaming, little chest heaving and mouth continuing to make that godawful noise. Kevin winces.

“So that’s a no?” 

Cale beats his fists against the ground.

“Great.” Kevin rolls his eyes. “Cool, thanks. See you never.” _This_ is why he should’ve never attempted to interact with the boy, and as he strolls away, Kevin is already moving onto other ideas. If not murder, they can always try something else. _He_ can always try something else.

Behind him, Cale continues to wail, screaming growing hoarse and snotty until the third party in their strange trio speaks up.

“Um. Are you okay? Do you want me to get a teacher?”

Cale hiccups. He shakes his head. 

He’s _fine_, even if indignation and distress is still wracking his every muscle. As long as Kevin leaves him alone he’ll be fine, and he would much prefer it if this other boy did too. 

“Uh – are you sure?” The boy walks away then, leaving Cale to sniff angrily in the silence. He misses his birds. He just wants to go – not home, but back to this spot behind the shed _before_ Kevin had to come barging in. As Cale mourns, he hears footsteps.

It’s the boy, now with a teacher in tow. 

Cale doesn’t know the woman, and he shuffles back as she kneels down to his height.

“Hey, how are you doing? Are you alright?”

Cale nods, mute. He’s _fine_! Despite this, the teacher continues to speak.

Her brow creases. “Are you sure? Do you want to go home early? If there’s something you want to tell me, or your homeroom teacher, I’m here to listen.”

“No.” Cale blurts. He channels as much malice as he can into his voice, and she looks at him sympathetically.

For some reason, his steadfast refusal never makes its way into either of their brains. Cale stares daggers at both of their backs as he follows the teacher back across the field. She tracks down Mr Markie in an instant.

“Cale!” He bends down in much the same way. Cale scowls. “What’s the matter? I heard there was trouble in the playground – do you want me to call home?”

He shakes his head once more, so furiously that he feels like his neck might snap straight off. Neither of the adults take it as a sign to stop. 

“It was an older student…” He hears the lady say, and Mr Markie frowns.

“Was someone being mean to you?”

Cale stops shaking his head to consider this question. He didn’t like what Kevin did, and the bad feeling it made him feel continues to linger just as the snot and tear-tracks on his face. In fact, the longer he focuses on it, the more the feeling coalesces from a lingering unease to a heavy, present ache in his belly.

He sniffles, and hiccups, and draws his shoulders up in the approximation of a shrug. A hand comes down onto his left shoulder when Cale starts to shake.

“Oh… let’s send you home now, okay? I’m sure you’ll feel better at home. You can tell me or your mum about what happened, right Cale?”

He mumbles a negative and watches mutely as Mr Markie stands up, to fetch him a tissue and to access the desktop in the corner.

“Here.” Cale takes the tissue and holds it limply.

“Do you want me to call your mum or your dad, Cale?”

“Mm…” he dithers, apprehensive. 

“Mum, then? Okay.”

He watches Mr Markie dial the number, then talk into the headset, then put it back down with a decisive, “Okay, she’ll be here in ten minutes. Do you want anything while we wait?”

“Nnmm.” Cale wipes at his wet upper lip with the tissue and its comes away, sodden.

“No? That’s okay.” His teacher moves around the room before returning to Cale’s side. “Here, let’s get you cleaned up before you go home.”

Cale flinches at the first brush of tissue paper to cheek, but he forces himself to stay still and let Mr Markie swab away the mess of snot and tears, if only because his mum would be asking questions otherwise.

She asks him regardless.

“What’s this about crying?” She says when they’re past school gates. “Is someone bullying you?”

“No.”

“Then what? You know you’re getting too old to be crying in public.”

He shuffles silently after her, looking down at his shoes as they scuff the pavement.

“Cale! Look at me when I’m talking to you. Why were you crying?”

“…Wasn’t.”

“Like hell you weren’t!” She reaches over to tweak his still-red nose, and he yelps.

Kevin is loath to admit it, but he’s getting bored. Again. That’s the struggle of being able to do (mostly) whatever he wants, he thinks morosely. It’s been nearly a week since he’s last seen that Cale kid, and he’s been considering the ‘what if’s of cutting one of his classmates open ever since.

It is with a sigh similar to defeat that Kevin returns to their meeting place, approaching Cale as if nothing had ever happened.

Cale bristles.

“Hey. Did you still want to stab someone? We can do it after school one day.”

“No!” The younger boy explodes.

Kevin throws his hands up in exasperation. “What, I thought you _liked_ doing this kind of thing? You went for that cat totally fine.”

“Cats don’t talk.”

The three little words give him pause. Frowning, Kevin thinks back to their last encounter – if only six-year-olds could be more eloquent.

“Oh, what, you don’t like that the guy talked to us?” He gets a shake of the head as expected. “I can tell them to shut up next time, no biggie.”

“…Really?”

Kevin raises a brow at the suddenly hopeful tone. Talk about a mood swing. “Yeah? Or stuff a shirt in their mouth – it’s not difficult.”

Cale nods, now giving him his full attention. “Oh. Okay. I like that.”

“Great.” Kevin has never once sought out the approval of anyone, especially not someone younger than himself, and the entire interaction leaves him feeling a little queasy inside. At least, he decides, he has something to look forward to in the coming days.

He slinks back to class, cradles his chin in one hand, and starts to daydream. He thinks about telling someone to stand still – or lie down. Handcuffing them or leaving the hands free – though it won’t matter in the end, Kevin’s seen what Cale does to birds’ legs and cats’ paws. Forcing a towel between teeth and down into throat. He hopes Cale will appreciate the effort.

If the kid wants to ruin this with another one of his perfectly-timed tantrums, Kevin decides, then he’ll have to _command_ the job done. Even if that ruins the unpredictable nature of it all.

Kevin is interrupted by some class exercise, then daydreams some more, then gets mindlessly to his feet as the bell rings. He nearly starts tracing the path home when he remembers the task at hand. Right!

He grabs the nearest classmate, the girl exclaiming at the sudden touch.

“Hey –”

“Let go of my arm!” 

Acquiescing, Kevin loosens his grip. “Hey, meet me on the field after school tomorrow.”

She gapes. “What?”

“I _said_ – ” Frustration is starting to leak into his voice, and Kevin shakes himself. He can _do_ this, he just needs to try again. “Meet me on the field after school tomorrow.”

As he watches, the girl’s expression shifts. He grins at the slight shuttering of eyelids, the glaze that creeps over her eyes. “Okay.”

“Perfect! See you there.”

She nods, once, and Kevin finally lets go of her arm. That’s his part sorted, then. Tomorrow afternoon can’t come soon enough.

There is not a cloud in the sky when they meet again, Cale and him and the girl, but their spot behind the shed remains shadowed as ever. The girl is alternating between staring at him and Cale, eyes about to bug right out of her head.

Fortunately, that’s the only indication of terror she can make, Kevin having commanded her to shut up _and_ stuffed a cloth in her mouth, for good measure. He presents her to Cale like an animal up for auction, and the kid blinks silently.

“So?” He prods, “You wanna do it now or – ? We don’t have all day.”

Cale considers the knife in his hands for a moment before looking back up at the pair of them. “Too tall.”

“What, so you want her to lie down?” Kevin huffs. “Go on then, lie down.” This he directs at the girl, though he has to manhandle her into position before the command finally works. “There. That do it for you?”

“Hmm…” Cale thinks once more, and walks decisively closer. They follow his every action, frozen. Kevin just wants to tell him to _‘Get on with it!’_

“Where to start…” the kid mumbles, nervously worrying a lip, and Kevin nearly loses his patience right there and then.

This is why he exclaims, a little too loudly: “Just pretend it’s a bird! Or something. Do what you normally do.”

Cale frowns, face pursing up for the longest while before he mumbles. “Okay.”

Kevin flops down to take a seat. “Yeah. Okay! Good.” He watches, eager, as the now-familiar knife finally rears its head, Cale mumbling and muttering and looking up and down before aiming a gash down one side of her neck. It beads red.

“You need to do it again!” Kevin cries. “Harder!”

Cale strikes once more. 

In hindsight, Kevin should have realised this earlier. People are larger than cats are larger than birds, and thus have more _blood_ in their bodies. It spurts red-hot into the grass, Cale effectively avoiding the brunt of it, and Kevin can feel his jaw drop as he watches the girl scream silently and thrash and slowly turn a funny colour (not red). The grass is growing quite damp.

“Well, keep going, then!” Kevin protests after Cale stops to sit and watches the sight, much like himself. Blood is still glugging out at a steady pace. 

“Needs to be dead. First.” Cale explains slowly. He prods one small finger into a cheek, then into both eyelids.

“Is she dead yet?”

A contemplative noise.

Only Kevin’s curiosity in finding out what her insides look like keeps him rooted to the ground. He follows Cale’s small form as the boy circles around her one way, then the other, knife drifting in his grip until it points abdomen-wards.

_Finally._

The sky has started to grow dim by the time Kevin comes to from his trance-like state, raptly holding his breath as he watched Cale work his magic. Limbs have long been separated from torso, and the steaming pile of guts quickly cooled as Cale reached in and in and in, to pop back out and present some small trophy and lay it carefully on the grass.

“What’s that?” Kevin gestures broadly at some lump of viscera.

“’N organ.”

“Oh.”

A wet stench fills the air that Kevin only now registers, and he wrinkles his nose, distinctly put-off. The shadows creeping in have blotted out details of the scene before him, and he contemplates, distracted.

He hums. “Might be dinner soon… might head back.”

“Oh. Okay.” Cale pipes up after a pause, not bothering to turn and look at him.

“Yeah.” Kevin stands up, stretching stiff knees and dusting himself off. “See you sometime.”

He wonders what’s for dinner.

The fact that his actions would have consequences doesn’t occur to Kevin until the next morning, when they get a ring from school about class being cancelled. He grins, about to celebrate when his mother adds:

“The principal wants you to come in and talk to him, Kevin.” Her tone is grim and fearful. “What did you do, Kevin?”

“Nothing!” He says cheerfully. And that is the truth, the same truth he repeats to the serious-faced Mr Collins an hour later. There are policemen in the room with them.

“Someone has been _murdered_ –”

Kevin shrugs. He wasn’t the… murderee. Murderer.

“And the person who we think did it told us you were there too. That you told him what to do.”

“I didn’t do anything,” he repeats. He wonders if the room is too hot – or too cold. Mr Collins looks to be turning red and trembling all at once. Kevin feels perfectly fine.

There is a tense minute of silence. “I’ll hand you over to the policemen here.” Mr Collins bites out. “Right now. Please tell them what happened,” he gabbles, before all but running from the room. Kevin turns in his seat to watch the door slam.

One of the police takes the empty seat with a heavy sigh. “So. Please answer my questions truthfully. Do you know a Cale Erendreich?”

“Nope.” Kevin pops the ‘p’.

“Then can you explain why, when we found him by the victim’s body, he told us about a Kevin in Mrs Harvey’s class who told him to do this?”

Kevin shrugs. “Kids have weird imaginations.” He slouches in his seat, annoyance creeping up as the torrent of questions continues to grow.

“I’ll need to take a DNA sample and fingerprints from you.”

At that, Kevin sits upright. He might not know much about legal procedures and murder cases and forensic pathology, but he definitely didn’t like the sound of that statement.

“No thanks. I didn’t do it.” He tries again. “I _didn’t do it. I don’t know anything_.”

The policeman’s demeanour shifts subtly. “Right. Thank you for talking to us. Take care – I know this must be stressful.”

“It’s not.” Kevin says simply. He leaves the room to poorly-masked expressions of surprise.

“See?” He says to his mum later, grin bright and proud. “I told you I didn’t do anything. It’s not always _me_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pls ignore loopholes... Thank YOu


	4. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a conclusion, from cale's pov

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and thus... i declareth... ThiS FIC COMPLETE

Cale is sitting in a room with his teacher and a counsellor. The light is too bright and it is too silent and there are too many adults and he _doesn’t like it_.

“Did you do it, Cale.” It’s not a question. “Tell us why you did it, Cale.”

He shrugs once.

Cale supposes this was larger than one bird – maybe _ten_ birds, he considers, mentally lining them in a row in his head – but if he just buries the remains then there wouldn’t be a problem. He wants to ask to go outside and do just that, but something stops him from speaking.

The counsellor tries again. “Please tell us what happened, Cale.”

He doesn’t see Kevin again after that unfortunate incident. 

“Kevin told me,” he tries to tell the adults, encouraged by their nods and sympathetic looks and queries about bullying. “Kevin told me to do it.”

The looks are quick to turn to mistrust and unease. “Kevin Thompson says he doesn’t know you or know anything about this. Please don’t lie, Cale.”

He shakes his head, mute.

Cale just wants to go back to that spot behind the shed, but they’ve cordoned it off. When they remove the cordon, he’s been transferred to another school. Then back home. 

“I’ll see you every day,” his counsellor says. “So you’ll come here instead of going to school. But don’t worry, you’ll be back to school in no time and seeing your friends.” Because he’s not allowed to leave the house except for to her office, she means, or have people come over.

“Don’t have friends,” Cale replies instead.

She doesn’t look pleased.

The first time he throws a tantrum is when they take the knife off him, sealed into a plastic baggy. Forensics marvels at the level of wear-and-tear on the little slice of metal. 

The second time, when he transfers and walks into a room full of brand-new faces. The fifth when he realises he can’t go outdoors by himself anymore. The dozenth when his counsellor offers him toys and there is not a single thing among them remotely alive _or_ dead.

He sniffles pitifully, and doesn’t bother to hide the moan that slips from his throat.

“What’s the matter, Cale?” She says, tone verging on gentle but not quite.

“No birds…”

“No, sorry. But you like other things too, right?” She presents options then, toy after toy after toy that Cale sullenly accepts. But it’s not the same.

He regains his independence once he turns eighteen, though the system never really loosens its grip on him. It was just a childhood fancy, Cale tries to convince himself. Just a toddler’s tantrums. It has been a decade of convincing himself, and yet the thoughts never fade.

Neither does his memory of the incident, which is why he recognises Kevin Thompson the moment he finds his hands crafting a coffee order at lightning speed, unbidden.

“Make it snappy.” Kevin barks.

Cale’s hands speed up. He dares to look away from the coffee for the barest moment, to level a glare.

“Kevin Thompson.”

The man looks up. “Oh?”

“Did you ever suffer _any_ consequences for what you did?” Cale maintains his eye contact and scalds a finger for his trouble. He bites back a hiss. “Why did you lie.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kevin says airily. “I’ve never done anything of serious consequence.” He looks at Cale then, properly looks. “And if you don’t hurry up with that coffee, I can make you burn your whole arm off.”

Grimacing, Cale forces his attention back down.

Kevin snatches the coffee from the counter once it’s done, swift to disappear back out into the world like he’d never been. And suddenly, Cale is hit with a purpose. A sudden interest, for the first time in twelve years.

He’ll find this Kevin Thompson. And then he’ll show him.

**Author's Note:**

> comments make happy writers!
> 
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